VSPEX BLUE – EMC’s Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offering

EMC announced VSPEX Blue, their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure offering earlier this week. With this product EMC is entering to the Hyper-Converged infrastructure market using VMware’s EVO:RAIL software. EMC is Redefining Simplicity by simplifying the IT infrastructure deployment and management.

Here in this post let us get into the details of this new offering..

EMC VSPEX was launched in 2012, converged infrastructure architecture which offered easy implementation of Private Cloud and End-User Computing. VSPEX BLUE is the latest offering from from the VSPEX family. This is a true hyper-converged infrastructure – compute, storage, networking and management – all in a 2U 4 node hardware with the SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center) building block.

As mentioned already above, EMC is using the EVO:RAIL software from VMware for enabling the hyper-converged feature. EVO:RAIL is the HCIA (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Architecture) from VMware which are being supplied via partners. EMC customized the software to have additional features such as support for ESRS, RecoverPoint for VMs etc…

The Hardware

VSPEX BLUE comes with 2U appliance and can have up to a 4 appliances in cluster. Single appliance will have 4 nodes.The below image shows the appliance from the front.

There are 2 memory variance available with VSPEX BLUE appliance, 192 GB ad 128 GB. The system with 128GB memory per node is called a Standard model and the one with 192GB is the performance model.

VSPEX BLUE deployment – initialization and set up – are all really simple . Customers can start provisioning VMs just in 15 minutes of power up..! The addition of an appliance adds all the components – compute, storage, networking and management. This scales up the cluster linearly and performance also increases linearly.

Patching/Upgrade are all NDU with zero downtime.

A very handy, VSPEX BLUE manager is the management software with VSPEX BLUE. It very well integrates with the EVO:RAIL software. It provides a great support experience with the ESRS/VE integration. Also VSPEX BLUE Manager is well hardware aware and gives graphical view of the hardware failures etc…

Support logs are collected automatically and are integrated with the vRealize Log Insight. VSPEX BLUE Manager gives the customer the detailed information of the installed softwares too. VSPEX BLUE Market option integrates access to qualified software products for VSPEX BLUE and VMware.

RecoverPoint for VMs is a qualified software which provides Synchronous and Asynchronous replication options with VSPEX BLUE. An appliance will have free license for 15 VMs support with RecoverPoint for VMs.

VSPEX BLUE, is expected to have upcoming models to be announced in the Q2, 2015. The product model announced on 3rd February will be GA later in February.